OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
297
I think we are in the position now to understand that the
concept of the "alienated artist" itself was as much a creation of
the popular mind as of the artist. It is no accident that Edgar Allan
Poe is both the prototype of the American Poet as
Despised
Dandy,
and the inventor of the most popular genres of "mass culture."
The image of the drunken, dope-ridden, sexually impotent, poverty–
oppressed Poe is as native to the American mind as the image of
the worker driving his new Ford into the garage beside the Cape
Cod cottage; together they are the American's image of
himself.
Poe, Crane, Fitzgerald--each generation provides itself with its own
lost artist-and their biographies are inevitable best-sellers.
I do not mean to imply that the role of scapegoat is not
actually painful for the artist;
his
exclusion and scourging is the
psychodrama of us all, but it is played out in earnest. Poe was in
a certain sense a poseur, but he died of his pose; and the end of
Fitzgerald was real terror. I want only to insist that the melancholy
and rebellious artist has always been a collaborator in American
culture-that it is only when he accepts the political or sentimental
half-truths of democracy, when he says
yes
too soon, that he be–
trays his role and his countrymen-and that the popular mind at
its deepest level is well aware of this.
Of
all
peoples of the world, we hunger most deeply for tragedy;
and perhaps in America alone the emergence of a tragic literature
is still possible. The masterpieces of our nineteenth-century literature
have captured the imagination of readers everywhere, precisely be–
cause their tragic sense of life renews vicariously the exhausted spirit.
In Western Europe, the tragic tension no longer exists; it is too
easy to despair and to fall in love with one's despair. Melodrama,
comedie larmoyante,
learned irony and serious parody-these are
the forms proper to the contemporary European mind. In the orbit
of Stalinism, on the other hand, despair has been legislated away;
justice triumphs and the wicked suffer- there is no evil except. in the
other. Some lies are the very stuff of literature, but this is not
among them; it breeds police forces rather than poetry.
Only where there is a real and advancing prosperity, a con–
stant effort to push beyond all accidental, curable ills, all easy cyni–
cism and premature despair toward the irreducible residuum of
human weakness, sloth, self-love, and fear; only where the sense
